Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitryminkovsky | Hacker News Reader

> Hundreds of millions of dollars is barely a blip on the federal government's budget.

That doesn’t mean that’s how it should be.

When you listen to old radio, you get the impression people actually cared about how money was spent and didn’t casually write off millions of dollars, just because “that’s the budget.” Why are people these days willing to let the government drop millions of dollars so casually?

Take for example this episode of Johnny Dollar: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PXa86HJ49iE (1956). The way the people in this episode are pissed off about their money being wasted, you’d think it was some other country.

When did people become OK with wasting money like this?

View on HN

NOLA brings in $8 billion a year in tourist money alone. The metropolitan region had a GDP of $235 billion in 2017. Investing a few hundreds of millions of dollars to preserve hundreds of billions of dollars in productivity seems like a smart investment.

Maybe the people of 2018 are just better at math than the ones in in 1956.

Thank you for injecting some sanity into the conversation.

The NPV of the region is such that the cost of the levees would have to increase 3 orders of magnitude before most of the comments that amount to “let it flood” would even begin to make any sense economically, despite being entirely morally bankrupt to begin with.

Hey didn’t say anything about NOLA or whether it “should be saved” or anything like that, just the attitude of not caring about millions of dollars just because... it’s in the budget or whatever.

NOLA can't even fix the damn potholes with that revenue. It's not that NOLA residents own Marriott Inc and that good part of money stays in the city. City's budget main contributor is sadly - traffic cameras.

NOLA is spending $2 billion in FEMA money right now to actually repave roads properly, including some in Deisre and Algiers that haven’t been worked over since the mid-90s. Roads in this Parish cost $10 million a mile to do right due to underlying soil geology. Do you even do research before you run your mouth? The contractor takes at least 40% of traffic camera revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com